An interesting post about SL machinima-making can be found on The Invisible Moose blog here. He says, "Why are we settling for a system of capturing the pixels cranked out by a video card working overtime, only to recieve footage of so-so quality when we could be capturing event data from this stream and saving it to a file for later rendering and yes, even editing." I've never thought about the idea of collecting metadata - I have no clue if it's feasible or even possible, or what it would look like if we could do it, but it's fun to think about. It would change machinima by separating rendering from scene set-up - hard even to think about it as our usual mode is like filming with a movie camera that has to expose and develop at one time.

What's wrong with most machinima isn't just limitations in the platforms as much as it's limitations in the the filmmaker, of course; I think a game changer like this idea would probably make certain very good filmmakers even better, but for most, if they tried it at all, it would likely just be more time spent for middling results. I'm such an "alla prima" artist that I'd probably not use it to get alternate angles and things, but being able to render after the fact would make for high quality and no pesky dropped frames.

Limitations can prompt creative solutions, and serve as an artistic spur, so they aren't all bad, however we'd have to go a long way to free ourselves to the merely-bound-hand-and-foot level. The difficulty in getting a little life into our avatars is a knotty problem requiring much work - careful shot angle and length, and custom animations are how I approach it, and it requires thinking in a particular way all the time (which is easy once one has been in SL for a while but isn't obvious to new resident machinimatographers). We are at the beginning of the craft's development, and improvements are likely to come in all directions at once - some more suddenly than expected (such as the 3D controllers), wiping out the erstwhile limit completely.

Labels: Machinima